A Method for Resource and Service Discovery in MANETs

The paper presents a novel resource and service discovery mechanism for MANETs using Routing Intelligent Mobile Agents(RIMAs). RIMAs periodically collect routing, resource and service availability information and index the same in appropriate RIMA nodes. Every mobile node is close to atleast one RIMA node. The mobile node running an application in need of a resource or a service dispatches a Discovery agent to its nearest RIMA node. The index available at the RIMA node will guide the Discoverer agent to the resource or service node. Analysis of the method reveals the computational complexity to be of the order of square of number of RIMA nodes. Communication overheads are the product of number of generated agents, agent size and number of hops travelled by an agent. The method has been simulated and tested on MANETs of varying sizes from 50 to 800 nodes. Simulation snapshots and results show the proper working and success of the algorithm.